You might wonder if the museum has designed a show for the sake of Instagram or Facebook likes. The cat-in-hole is a recognizable internet meme, while the show’s title is itself a clear play on Snapchat, the messaging and photo-sharing app. And the museum, a short walk from Twitter headquarters, is actively competing with other cultural institutions to reach the local technology community, for both funding and audience.
But the exhibition offers more than opportunities for selfies (there are two or three). Clément Chéroux, the museum’s senior photography curator (who said he received no financial support from the industry), is exploring how the transmission of images has evolved from analog to digital times. In particular, he makes a compelling argument for the serious art-historical lineage of social media photo sharing.
The show questions the common mythology that the internet has radically changed the way we share pictures of ourselves, our pets and our vacations, and created “an entirely new kind of dialogue,” as technology reporter Nick Bilton wrote. Instead, it proposes that the roots for this kind of sharing came decades earlier, making for an evolution, not a revolution.
“We have been sending postcards and snapshots since the early time of photography,” Chéroux said, although noting that the volume and intensity of communication have of course grown with social media. “The whole exhibition is playing with this tension,” he said. “It’s new — and not so new.”
The show makes its argument most dramatically with its focus on “mail art” of the 1960s and ’70s, artists’ projects that used the Postal Service as an unwitting collaborator. Ray Johnson, for instance, sent a photographic self-portrait to Joseph Cornell in 1966 in hopes of establishing a relationship with one of his artistic heroes. And Lynn Hershman Leeson made postage stamps in 1972 with images of her face partly obscured, challenging the U.S. government to stamp them and further obliterate her identity.
Other mail artists in the show include On Kawara, a Japanese conceptual artist; Jan Dibbets, a Dutch artist who experimented with color photography and perspective; and Endre Tót, a Hungarian artist affiliated with the fluxus group. Examples by dozens of lesser-known practitioners are featured in a large window display of mail art sent to San Francisco artist and archivist John Held.
Chéroux’s premise that mail art prefigured social media is debatable. The form was one of the 20th-century’s most subversive modes of art-making, with roots in the anti-art and anti-commodity movements of dada and fluxus — in contrast with the commercial DNA of image-sharing today. And mail artists were typically sending postcards, letters and packages to select, hand-picked recipients, networks far from the enormous reach and popularity of social media.
Why not look back to other historical moments when photography was transmitted through mass media, such as the rise of photography magazines or photo books? Chéroux said his interest was more in the intimate, “person-to-person exchange of images, the gestures that say, ‘I am here,’ or, ‘This is me,’” an impulse he said mail art and social media share.
Jeff Guess, a Paris-based artist in the show, finds the argument oddly persuasive. “I have made mail art before, and it seems to me like an amorous relationship with someone, where you spend a lot of time making art for that person. But you can also see social media as a form of interpersonal communication using images, just on a much more massive scale.”
For his computer animation “Addressability” in the contemporary section of the show, Guess developed a program that takes images posted on Twitter under the hashtag “selfie” and disintegrates each of them into a galaxy of pixels that float in space. The shards get pieced back together into one legible image, only to explode.
While internet or digital art is still a relatively rare subject for museum exhibitions, a growing number of shows are looking into the historical roots of the field. “Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965-2018” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, through April 14, shows how early instruction-driven conceptual art by Sol LeWitt, Lawrence Weiner and others anticipated works that were programmed by computer. “The Body Electric,” which opened recently at the Walker Art Center, takes the past 50 years of virtual life as its domain. And the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany — a leader in this field — just closed “100 Masterpieces With and Through Media,” a century-spanning show that also happened to include some examples of mail art.
“In the age of Snapchat, mail art becomes more interesting again,” said Peter Weibel, the artist-theorist who runs ZKM. Weibel said mail art fulfills two of his three criteria for “media art:” by using an “apparatus” for production (such as a typewriter) and one for distribution (such as a truck or plane) — it only lacks an apparatus for reception.
In “Snap+Share,” perhaps the most prescient example of mail art is Kawara’s “I Got Up ... ,” a set of touristy picture postcards he mailed on a daily basis to friends or colleagues from different locations. He stamped each card with the time that he got up each morning. The series seems made for posting on Twitter or Facebook, although it began in 1968. Running over 10 years, it explored the themes of image overload and information saturation that marks the current cultural moment.
The last half of “Snap+Share” shows artists today responding to this image overflow. Erik Kessels’ installation “24HRS in Photos,” first realized in 2011, takes the form of a mountain of photographic prints filling an entire gallery, meant to evoke the hundreds of thousands of images uploaded to Flickr in one 24-hour-period that year. Corinne Vionnet’s series “Photo Opportunities” features tourist sites like the Eiffel Tour and the Golden Gate Bridge. But instead of showing one image of a famous landmark, she makes a blurry (but still intelligible) composite out of dozens she found online — documenting what she calls “tourist clichés.”
Chéroux decided against including made-for-Instagram work by artists like Stephen Shore and Cindy Sherman. “You don’t need to go to a museum to see it,” he said. “You can see it on your own cellphone at home.”
The museum does stage a selfie opportunity, making available a refrigerator where people can pose with their heads in the freezer, following the instructions of artist David Horvitz. He first posted them on social media in 2009 and the work has been generating goofy images ever since.
Another experiment in meme-making, the cat at the entrance to the exhibition returns in the very last gallery. Only now instead of a photo reproduction on the wall, the creature takes the form of a taxidermied cat poking out of a hole in the museum ceiling, its pale green eyes glinting from above. This work was made by artists Eva and Franco Mattes, who were riffing on the famous “ceiling cat” image first posted online in 2006. They took the weightless creature looking at us looking at it — some see it as a symbol of the internet itself — and transformed it intoa three-dimensional sculpture.
And it could, in our age of image acceleration, morph again in a nanosecond. Now that this cat has reached such a high perch in the museum sphere, it is bound to be photographed and posted by visitors, sending it back into the vast digital stream. In this way, the ending of the show marks another beginning, with the old-school, art-world divisions between high and low culture collapsing along the way.
“What we see today is a loop from popular culture to art back to popular culture,” Chéroux said. “And that’s the reason we encourage photography by visitors in the show, not just because it’s trendy, but because it also says something about the real reciprocity of the art being made today.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.